Thursday, March 22, 2012

Why do clone style backups?

Why, because if you think something is perfect or at least working just
the way you want it to, why would you want to create it from scratch if
it was to break. But beware, like Skeletor here, if you have all the
clones working at the same time, they will all want to be in charge!

What is a clone backup?

Basically,
if you clone your hard drive (HDD) you are taking an exact copy. Now if
you lose your hard drive, it breaks or something else unimaginable
happens to it, you just have to pop the clone in and you're back in
business. Well... almost. The clone is a snapshot of your hard drive at
the exact point in time that you make it. Therefore, if you made the
clone a month ago, that's what you've got, everything from a month ago.
There
are ways around this though. One is to make regular clones, that does
get boring quickly though, especially as you can't use your computer for
anything else when you're making a clone of your hard drive. The other
is use the cloud. Using Dropbox
or InSync, a folder on your computer (and all subfolders contained
within) are backed up to the cloud. If you put all your working
documents in here, so your word, excel or anything else that you change
on a daily basis that so happens to be stored locally on your computer,
they are synchronised to the cloud.
Now, say our hard drive fails,
we can insert our month old clone hard disk and dropbox will
synchronise the missing files and update ones that have been changed in
the month. Simple!
With larger files that can't be
synchronised with dropbox or other similar services, you have a choice
of finding a service that will synchronise them, storing them on
external media or updating your clone more often.
Program files
can stored in the same way, but I would suggest that you don't add
programs too often and therefore just update the clone when you've done a
complex installation of a new program or installed a few since the last
cloning.

How to Clone

So I've talked a lot about cloning and what it is and why to do it, now it's time to look at how. Simply I would recommend Acronis True Image, but there are other cloning programs out there.
I've
also used Acronis clones to create a lot of computers with the same
configuration in an office environment, it beats the hell out of doing
many... many installations of windows, your corporate software and
configuring each, however there are considerations when doing this like
DHCP and computer names, but that's a different story.